The Hero of New Orleans

Andrew Jackson became a major general in the Tennessee Militia in February 1802, but a decade passed before he was called upon to fight. Meanwhile, tensions in the borderlands between Tennessee, the Mississippi Territory, Spanish Florida, and the Creek Nation continued to rise. Isolated attacks by Indians on white settlers were attributed in part to Spanish and British provocateurs, and Washington’s apparent indifference to the safety of western settlements frustrated local leaders. General Jackson urged his men to be ready should the Creeks “raise their Tomahawks and Scalping knives against our peaceable frontiers.” Not only would a provocation allow them to avenge “the murders and outrages committed” by the Indians, but it would also supply a pretext to seize “inviting” Creek territory and “consolidate it as part of our Union.”

A Creek attack on Fort Mims—an isolated fort on the Alabama River, approximately forty miles north of Mobile—on August 30, 1813, escalated an open war between the United States and the hostile elements of the Creek Nation, known as Red Sticks for the distinctive red war clubs they carried. As many as four hundred militia soldiers, settlers, enslaved people, and Indians were killed. When news of the Fort Mims massacre reached Nashville, General Jackson was recovering from a gunshot wound suffered in a duel. Legislator Enoch Parsons expressed regret that Jackson would be unable to take the field with mobilized Tennessee troops, but Jackson is said to have responded, “The Devil in Hell, he is not!” As his men mustered for duty, Jackson was there in the saddle to lead them, his arm in a sling.

Over the next several months, Jackson carried the fight into the heart of Creek territory, and though he lacked formal training as an officer, his tactical instincts and stubborn refusal to fail sustained a successful offensive campaign. After victories at Tallushatchee and Talladega, General Jackson struggled in the winter months of 1814 to overcome logistical hurdles, such as expiring militia enlistments, as well as costly skirmishes at Emuckfaw and Enitochopco Creek, before reinforcements enabled him to renew the campaign. The decisive battle against the Red Sticks was fought at Tohopeka (Horseshoe Bend) on the Tallapoosa River in what is now central Alabama. An estimated one thousand warriors held a fortified position, but Jackson’s superior numbers and firepower encircled and eventually overwhelmed the Creeks. “It was dark before we finished killing them,” the general later wrote.

After the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson moved on to the confluence of the Tallapoosa and Coosa Rivers, where an American fort was being constructed on the former site of Fort Toulouse, built by the French in the eighteenth century. Jackson was astonished when the fugitive Red Stick leader William Weatherford, also known as Lamochattee (Red Eagle), entered the American camp alone and unarmed, seeking peace from his victorious enemy. Weatherford’s brave gesture and the friendship of Jackson’s faithful Creek allies little availed the Creek Nation when it came to the treaty negotiations that took place at the fort, which would later bear Jackson’s name, the following August. There, Jackson demanded and received the cession of more than half of the Creeks’ ancestral lands, or about three-fifths of what would become the state of Alabama. By this time, Jackson’s Indian friends and foes had begun to refer to him by a new nickname: Sharp Knife. With the Treaty of Fort Jackson, he slashed an opening for American expansion all the way to Spanish Florida, where British officers were rumored to be plotting a new offensive on the southern coast.

In the wake of the Creek War, Jackson received a commission as a major general in the regular United States army and command of the Seventh Military District, which included Tennessee, Louisiana, the Mississippi Territory, and the land just seized from the Creek Nation. It may seem remarkable that the entire southwestern United States, including the critical port of New Orleans, was entrusted to a relatively unknown general. But the War of 1812 was not going well, and several fiascos involving Revolutionary War–era generals prompted President Madison to promote officers who got results.

General Jackson was determined to deny the British any foothold on the Gulf Coast. In early November, he and his men seized and briefly occupied Pensacola, the capital of Spanish West Florida, after hearing that British troops had been allowed the use of its harbor and forts. Soon thereafter Jackson learned that New Orleans was the objective of a large British invasion force gathering in Jamaica. Leaving some men to defend Mobile, he hastened overland to Louisiana, reaching New Orleans in early December, just as the sails of the British fleet were sighted off the coast.

In the weeks that followed, Jackson roused the diverse citizenry of New Orleans and lower Louisiana to join him in the defense against the British invaders. Public discord and Jackson’s own doubts about the loyalties of the locals persuaded him to declare martial law. Despite his misgivings, Louisianans of all colors and creeds heeded his call for aid, and local militia and regular US troops were soon augmented by volunteers from Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. This combined American force fought a number of engagements against a larger and more experienced British army under the command of Major General Sir Edward Pakenham.

The culminating battle was fought a few miles downriver from the city on the cold and rainy morning of January 8, 1815. Jackson’s strong defensive position and superior artillery overcame the coordinated attacks of British infantry regiments attacking across open ground; two British major generals, including Pakenham, were killed, and a third was wounded. More than two thousand British casualties lay scattered in front of Jackson’s line when the smoke cleared, whereas American losses were few. It was then, and is now, one of the greatest military upsets in history.

In late January and early February of 1815, people in cities throughout the United States daily expected the news that New Orleans, the country’s most important western port, had fallen to the enemy. Few believed that a small American force could prevail against the veteran British army that had burnt the US Capitol the previous summer. So when reports of a lopsided American victory began to spread up the Atlantic seaboard in early February, the country rejoiced. Bells rang, people cheered, and newspapers could not be printed quickly enough. Everyone wanted to see and know more about the victorious American general from Tennessee.

Unfortunately for the public, and for the artists poised to satisfy their demands, almost no one knew what Andrew Jackson looked like beyond the handful of people who had met him in person. From 1815 to 1819, most of the images of Jackson that were widely available in prints, souvenir objects, and books were derived from two early portraits of Jackson that were made in New Orleans within weeks of the battle. The two works were very different from each other, and neither was a good likeness. The historian James Barber carefully traced the lineages of these various early likenesses in his 1991 study of Andrew Jackson portraiture. It was not until the winter of 1819, after his service in the First Seminole War, that Jackson sat for accomplished portrait painters who captured the famous general as he actually appeared.

It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of Jackson’s popularity in early nineteenth-century art and song, particularly in the southern and western states and territories. Depictions of Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, and of Jackson himself, formed a significant part of a post–War of 1812 surge in American patriotic imagery. Frontier militiamen and their general became paragons of American masculinity and self-reliance.